Thinking about it more, I could introduce the subscription model by knowing how far along each insert is in the harvest cycle, and offer to ship new inserts right as the existing insert harvest is winding down.
I wonder... you could advertise something like this as a health product. Let's say you have Celiac and you need to eat gluten free. Using this AutoMicroFarm, you can grow exactly what your customer needs (some lettuce strains may be hard on the stomach, some much better etc), so using your combined data from all units, customers, you can make sure that a certain AutoMicroFarm unit is completely fine tuned to that customers health needs.
Celiac is a silly example, but hopefully you know what I mean! I'd definitely be looking into this because it's realistic, and could help people a lot. Another wee example is that a lot of mass-produced foods are probably genetically modified and have odd chemicals which of course a lot of the population have adverse reactions to -- using an AutoMicroFarm unit, you can make sure that the food is completely organic, no chemicals, you have a record of everything that's gone on so you know you're safe to eat it.
Though, I'm probably talking crap!
p.s. I'm into hydroponics, etc. Done a few things like this unit with Tessel and stuff so I'm excited to see where you end up.
Thanks, I'll definitely keep that in mind! I have a friend who eats only organic for health reasons and to avoid ingesting the odd chemicals you mention, and he's definitely interested in an AutoMicroFarm.
There may be overlap with the market for food spectrometers, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-six... . You are providing food supply chain transparency at the point of production rather than consumption. This is related to software security efforts to build reproducible binaries from open source, to guarantee production integrity.
